Eddy Lazzarin
GP at a16z crypto
“We already have quasi-super intelligent beings in the world — corporations, countries. None of them are aligned with each other. They don't have any built-in guaranteed alignment. They didn't go through HR training to become a corporation, to become a country. We don't test the alignment of any entities as a prerequisite for their existence.”
a16z Podcast · Startups & Venture · September 2026
Theo Jaffee had just laid out the standard AI-doom argument: a system far more capable than humanity, not bound by law the way individuals are, ends up with no need for us. Lazzarin's answer is that we never controlled powerful entities through alignment in the first place — we did it with laws, cryptography and other external mechanisms, and he thinks those can work here too. It reframes the safety debate as a control and cybersecurity problem rather than a values problem.
Transcript
…in the typical manner, right? It's about something else. It's a blend of genuine cybersecurity concerns, sort of philosophical millenarian arguments about the end times. There's a bunch of things in the mix and they get a little bit confused. And so I think picking them apart is really useful.
…near future. And if it is not sufficiently aligned with human values and is not bound by constraints in the way that individual humans are, like law and ultimately the ability to have that law enforced on them, then they will have like no need for humanity and then they might like kill everyone.
Yeah. I mean, there's so many assumptions in that argument. That's like, that's an argument. That's like a stairway to heaven full of arguments. Right. Like there's the presumption that there's no control. You know, we already have quasi-super intelligent beings in the world, right? Corporations, countries, none of them are aligned with each other. They don't have any built-in guaranteed alignment. They didn't go through HR training to become a corporation, to become a country. We don't test the alignment of any entities as a prerequisite for their existence. That's just not the way the world works. Instead, we use laws in the case that laws like in software are too slow. We use cryptography. We use actual mechanisms to limit them. There's a whole array of different types of mechanisms we put in place to try to control things. And I think that they can control highly, highly capable beings. Now, without getting too far into the superintelligence thing, remember, like the most powerful and most enthralling form of argument that we have, the one that's making everyone crazy and very interested, is around superintelligence. But…
Well, I agree that most of the sort of AI cyber incidents that we've seen so far have been mostly control failures, especially ones that relied on testing environments supplied by the company irregular, which had all kinds of defects, which are basically training models to reward hack. The Hugging…
agents to be in emergent ways. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, I think like the whole like agent swarm terminology assumes too much on the part of the models being evil. It makes them sound evil. Like I think Rune tweeted like they should be called agent fleets instead. I think that's a good one.
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